The Shape of Online Tribes

If you think moderating a Discord1 server full of meme-spamming teenagers is rough, imagine trying to keep two grad students from murdering each other over a Linux kernel patch on Usenet,2 while both are dialing in at 28.8 kbps. Welcome to the long and glorious tradition of online tribes: noisy, passionate, and always one flame war away from implosion.

From the ASCII3 wastelands of Usenet to the emoji-encrusted kingdoms of Discord, online communities keep mutating their shapes. But at their core, the problems have remained the same. Which is why every founder building a “community-driven product” in 2025 is still just reenacting the headaches of a Usenet moderator in 1993.

Usenet: The Proto-Village

Usenet was less a platform and more a lawless prairie of text. Discussions were deep, niche, and eternal. A thread about C vs Lisp could outlast empires. There were no guardrails. Spam ran free. Every new user triggered groans.

Founders love to talk about “engagement.” Usenet had engagement. The kind where someone would spend three weeks arguing about a semicolon. Imagine pitching that to VCs, “Our users argue so long, they forget to sleep.”

Forums and Bulletin Boards: Medieval Fiefdoms

Then came phpBB, vBulletin, and their cousins. Suddenly, every geek with a hosting account could run their own digital fiefdom. You had mods wielding ban hammers like medieval lords. You had endless forum signatures filled with GIFs that could blind you at 3 AM.

Problems multiplied: power-hungry mods, cliques, eternal off-topic threads. But the structure gave tribes a sense of belonging. Your forum was your kingdom. Until someone rage-quit, forked the community, and founded a rival forum across the digital river.

IRC and Early Chatrooms: The Tavern Phase

IRC4 was where speed replaced permanence. A chatroom was less a community and more a smoky tavern. Conversations flew by. If you blinked, you missed it.

“Founders don’t build communities; they just pray the villagers don’t burn down the tavern.”

But of course, taverns have problems. Tight cliques, gatekeeping, and lots of in-jokes that new users never understood. “Join #channel?” Sure. But first, endure three weeks of being ignored. If you survived, you might get noticed. Sound familiar to anyone who ever joined a Discord and sat in silence while the cool kids spammed emojis?

Social Networks: The Empires

Then the scale broke everything. MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter turned tribes into sprawling nations. What was once 30 nerds on a forum became a billion people shouting into the void.

Twitter, sorry, “X,” the world’s only town square rebranded to sound like a failed dating app. It’s where cat memes beat Nobel laureates, and the pivot screams desperation louder than the users who forgot why they stayed.

Moderation? Impossible. Gatekeeping? Replaced by algorithmic feeds designed to fuel outrage. The empire phase brought reach, virality, and enough chaos to make you nostalgic for forum flame wars about anime vs manga.

Founders building in this era discovered the paradox of scale: more users, less community. More money, less soul. Every empire eventually rots under its own weight. Just ask MySpace.

Discord and Slack: The Modern Return to Tribes

After the empire collapsed, we reverted to tribal ways. Slack, Discord, Telegram - smaller groups, tighter bonds, emoji rituals, bot overlords.

“Every startup Slack eventually turns into either a ghost town or a never-ending tech-support line.”

But the problems never left. Moderation still burns out volunteers. Gatekeeping is alive and well. Every “community” eventually becomes either (a) a ghost town where the last message is “hey, is anyone still here?” or (b) an eternal support line where the only conversation is “how do I reset my password?”

Founders rebranded these headaches as “community engagement.” The translation: “Please keep each other busy while we figure out monetization.”

The Eternal Problems of Tribes

Strip away the UI, the platforms, the emojis, and you’ll find the same dilemmas Usenet mods faced:

Every founder discovers that the software doesn’t solve this. Humans are messy. Humans bring drama. And no amount of server boosts or AI-driven moderation will change that.

Why Founders Still Care

“The tools change. The tribal drama stays the same.”

Because communities, eeerrrr, “brand engagement,” are essentially free labor. They market your product, answer support questions, and create memes that money can’t buy. A healthy tribe is retention, feedback loop, and virality rolled into one.

But communities also turn into cults, implode in drama, or devour their own moderators. Every founder who dreams of “community-led growth” eventually realizes: you don’t manage a tribe. You hold the line and pray the villagers don’t burn down your tavern.

The shape of online tribes keeps changing. ASCII walls, GIF-laden forums, smoky IRC taverns, algorithmic empires, Discord servers full of anime profile pics. The software is different. The sociology is the same.

So next time your product’s Slack erupts into chaos, remember this: you are part of a noble, hilarious tradition. A tradition that started when someone on Usenet wrote, “Actually, C is superior to Lisp,” and triggered a flame war that never really ended.

  1. Discord is where every community starts as a family dinner and ends as tech support with memes. It’s the world’s loudest library—channels neatly labeled but nobody reads before shouting. Think of it as a startup’s Slack cosplay, except with more anime avatars and fewer deadlines. It’s also the only place where you can argue about quantum physics while a bot plays lo-fi beats in the background. ↩

  2. Usenet was the digital Wild West, a lawless prairie of ASCII where arguments about C vs Lisp could last longer than most marriages. It was basically Reddit without the UI, where every new user was treated like an invading barbarian. Threads sprawled endlessly, spam galloped free, and “moderation” meant praying someone with spare time would care enough to step in. In short, it was the first online tribe—chaotic, brilliant, and utterly unmanageable. ↩

  3. ASCII was the original emoji set, except every face looked like a colon and a bracket doing interpretive dance. It was the duct tape of early computing—used for code, art, and flame wars alike. Entire arguments, jokes, and even “graphics” lived in those 128 characters, proving you don’t need pixels to waste hours online. In short, ASCII was both the language of the machine and the soundtrack of nerd rage. ↩

  4. IRC was basically Twitter without the receipts—say something dumb, log off, and it vanished like dignity at a LAN party. Channels were digital speakeasies where the password was either an obscure topic or sheer indifference to newcomers. It was less “community” and more “who can type the fastest while pretending to know regex.” ↩